1221
Raymond IV and Roger-Bernard de Foix recapture the town of Montreal in their crusade against the Cathars.

1231Pope Gregory IX issues the Excommunicamus, resulting in the inclusion into canon law of the harsh 1224 constitution of Frederick II. This explicitly permits the burning of heretics at the stake.

1521
Suleiman the Magnificent leads a massive army out of Instanbul for the purpose of conquering Hungary from king Louis II.

1841Mormons in Illinois founded the Nauvoo Legion, an independent local militia tasked with defending Mormon interests. Joseph Smith was named its lieutenant general, the first American to claim that rank since George Washington.

1953Lebanon became the first Arab state to grant women the right to vote.

1973
The American Bar Association adopted a resolution which advocated allowing abortion on demand at any point during the first twenty weeks of pregnancy.

1993
The Internal Revenue Service found that money from Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour program was illegally diverted to a political action committee. The IRS imposed a $50,000 fine on Falwell and revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour's tax-exempt status for 1986-87.

1996Catholic bishops in France announced that it is acceptable to use condoms in order to stop the transmission of AIDs. The only circumstances in which this is considered licit is "in the case of people for whom sexual activity is already part of their personal lives, and where such activity would present serious risk" - thus, a married couple where one is already infected by HIV and doesn't want to pass it along to their spouse.

1997
Representatives of the Anglican Church from South America, Africa and Pacific regions meet in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and voted for a resolution that declared "all sexual promiscuity is sin," a statement that the included homosexuality.

1999Jerry Falwell's National Liberty Journal newspaper issued a "parental alert" which warned that Tinky Winky, a character on the children's show "Teletubbies," might be gay.

1999Religion in Public Schools: Darryl Redmond, a church pastor and the new head of the Detroit Board of Education, proposed that prayer rooms be established in all Detroit public schools. Board member Margaret Betts said that such rooms should be created "where a person can go and meditate or pray...The day we took prayer out of our school is the day we changed the personality of the whole environment... We've got to bring what's right back." Chapels or special rooms were set aside for religious purposes to the bill required that public money be spent constructing and maintaining the rooms.

1999
Paul Weyrich, conservative activist who founded the Free Congress Foundation and co-founded the Moral Majority, announces that religious conservatives should give up their political battles and "drop out of this culture." Weyrich's announcement is apparently motivated by the failure of Republicans to impeach president Bill Clinton.

2001
Although Pope Paul VI had declared the provision for capital punishment in the Vatican City-State null in 1969, it is not formally removed from the books until February of 2001.

2002
Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the group tasked with handling all allegations of sexual abuse of a minor by a priest), Italian Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, suggests that theabuse scandal in America was being driven by financial greed: "Even though the absolutely negative judgment on this behavior remains even if the acts happened 30 or 40 years ago, there is a well-founded suspicion that some of these charges, that arise well after the fact, serve only for making money in civil litigation."

2003
A council of Muslim clerics in Afghanistan denounce a call for jihad from the remnants of the Taliban against U.S. forces in that country. In retaliation the Taliban assassinated several clerics who took part in that decision.

2003
The Vatican releases an 88-page document about New Age spiritualities and alternative religions. Although it does not condemn such movements, it does argue that Catholics should be very careful with them because they are "difficult to reconcile with Christian doctrine and spirituality."

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